Lower game difficulty. Less focus on squalor and need to scrape by. Wear and tear code is exhausting.

Sparring weapons should do stamina or stun damage. If you make a combatant with more than 4-5 skills then it really sucks to get moderates or even severes every sparring match, which lasts for ten seconds.

Put plenty of subtle magic IG. And a little bit of not so subtle.

Last edited by LuckyV on Thu Jun 26, 2014 6:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

LuckyV wrote:Lower game difficulty. Less focus on squalor and need to scrape by. Wear and tear code is exhausting.

Sparring weapons shouldndo stamina or stun damage. If you make a combatant with mire than 4-5 skills then it really sucks to get moderates or even severes every sparring match, which lasts for ten seconds.

Put plenty of subtle magic IG. And a little bit of not so subtle.

Seconding all of this, especially sparring.

Also, it's currently impossible to yield if you are stunned during sparring. This is very dangerous for obvious reasons.

Sparring needs a downside. That downside is you get injured and can't go out for a bit. You're already upping your combat skills in a completely safe environment. Now you want to remove the one downside to it?

Fractures need to be addressed. The natural healing rate is incredibly low, if it exists at all, and the fracture won't disappear as an infection does until the injury is very nearly healed.

On Atonement, we got around this by a skilled medic with the proper medication attending to a person repeatedly - or at least, I had to do this a few times - to help heal it by expertly treating it. The tools to do so do not exist here.

Letters wrote:Fractures need to be addressed. The natural healing rate is incredibly low, if it exists at all, and the fracture won't disappear as an infection does until the injury is very nearly healed.

On Atonement, we got around this by a skilled medic with the proper medication attending to a person repeatedly - or at least, I had to do this a few times - to help heal it by expertly treating it. The tools to do so do not exist here.

Set effort makes a tangible difference?

Set effort has never been worth shit for damage rolls afai can tell.

Re: medicine I have about five crafts I'mma write up after work today and post.

As for sparring... you are beating each other ferociously with heavy sticky of solid wood. Perhaps setting your effort to 25 or 50, and setting defensive?

Agreed that not being able to surrender while stunned is an issue.

Yeah so you go to train with your partner and then split his skull with a stick. Because he has to learn a lesson, right?

You go there to practice holding a sword properly and swinging properly.

Make it so that you can spar raise your skill to mid familiar or adroit and then it's only combat.

The problem: You start out with very bad skills because you selected 8, but thought okay I can still raise them IG. But you can't spar properly because you get K.O.ed in a few rounds simply due to your low skills. So that means that you haven't raised your skill at all unless you got really lucky to raise it in those couple strikes you had the opportunity to make.

Then you spend the rest few RL days rping in the infirmary. Then it's all the same.

Piercing weapons have an increased chance of dealing bleeders. Set Effort affects skill levels but not damage. Set Careful is what you want, but even that won't entirely solve the problem with broken bones/etc.

IMO, sparring is dangerous and should have consequences.

The other option is to make a low level two-man "sparring" craft that has a rather large timer, drains stamina and is only good up to familiar level of skill (with checks vs weapon-type and deflect). IMO, this is what sparring should be. Sparring shouldn't be used to reach "Talented" level of skills, unless you're willing to accept broken bones or bleeders.

Songweaver wrote:
The other option is to make a low level two-man "sparring" craft that has a rather large timer, drains stamina and is only good up to familiar level of skill. IMO, this is what sparring should be. Sparring shouldn't be used to reach "Talented" level of skills, unless you're willing to accept broken bones or bleeders.

I think this is my favorite post in a long, long, long time. Sweet baby zombie Jesus yes.

Songweaver wrote:The other option is to make a low level two-man "sparring" craft that has a rather large timer, drains stamina and is only good up to familiar level of skill (with checks vs weapon-type and deflect). IMO, this is what sparring should be. Sparring shouldn't be used to reach "Talented" level of skills, unless you're willing to accept broken bones or bleeders.

This might be interesting. It's also possible for crafts to cause damage directly, if I'm not mistaken. I know there were a few training crafts in old SOI that caused damage (and more of it for shitty skill rolls). Making the craft require actual other players would be a good fix for the problem those had of antisocial training behaviors...

RiderOnTheStorm wrote:Sparring needs a downside. That downside is you get injured and can't go out for a bit. You're already upping your combat skills in a completely safe environment. Now you want to remove the one downside to it?

You have a minor bruise on the thorax, a moderate crush on the thorax, a small
bruise on the left forearm, a grievous contusion on the right hip
(fractured), and a moderate contusion on the abdomen.
Overall Health: **
Remaining Stamina: ||||||
Trauma Sustained: ^^^^^^

Yes. completely safe and not at all dangerous. Nope. FYI, codedly, practice weapons are just as effective as the weapons everyone started with, so no. It isn't all that safe.

I don't think it's unrealistic to need to consume all that food. It can take up to a full RL 24 hours, to go to starving. That's what.. 4? 5 IG days? More? So when you think about it.. 12 pieces of meat, over the course of five days isn't that much. It wouldn't be so much if folks went and ate regularly. Often people wait until a patrol, or they want to go do something.

Songweaver wrote:
The other option is to make a low level two-man "sparring" craft that has a rather large timer, drains stamina and is only good up to familiar level of skill. IMO, this is what sparring should be. Sparring shouldn't be used to reach "Talented" level of skills, unless you're willing to accept broken bones or bleeders.

I think this is my favorite post in a long, long, long time. Sweet baby zombie Jesus yes.

I've been thinking of suggesting the same thing for a while now. Atonement actually had crafts like this during ALPHA. Allowing newer PCs to reach, say, low-Familiar levels with combat skills this way seems fair to me. Crafts definitely shouldn't be a means of reaching Talented, though, especially if we're expecting PCs' skills to cap at lower values than for ARPI.

ETA: And crafts should raise weapon skills, NOT Deflect, Dual-Wield, or Sole-Wield.

Well, you already start out familiar in your weapon skill if your associated stats are high, and why should training not raise the other combat skills?

There's an odd taboo against sparring that has existed since Atonement came about. I think it was understandable for that game because sparring felt sort of unnatural in a survival-horror setting with a supernatural enemy and where people were barely scraping by and living in constant resource scarcity -- not to mention the fact that guns existed and should have made melee weapons a backup thing instead of the primary method of fighting that the code mandated. These things made sparring routines seem unrealistic and "gamist."

This is Middle-Earth, however. People are soldiers, and the only thing that really threatens them is a thing that can be responded to in one way only: the sword. It's one of the defining themes of the setting, in fact. Combat training would be a part of daily life for anyone in that profession. It also happens to be one of the only things you can really do to convey the routines and rigors of the soldier role, since battles happen really rarely and patrols are almost always completely uneventful.

More importantly, however: it makes no sense for sparring to be able to teach you only the basics. That's simply not how training works. You become a master through training, not through trial and error. The last steps towards fulfilled potential might require real battle experience, but there are no grounds for relegating sparring to basic newbie training. It's neither realistic nor really beneficial to the game.

In fact, those who have played Armageddon might have discovered that one of the worst ways to become good at fighting in that game is to be a soldier (despite their bizarrely strict clan training schedules) and the best is to go out and randomly kill animals (or people, but that's scarcely an option here). This is the reality you face when you make sparring ineffectual beyond middling skill levels.

Now, I don't know if I would actually want sparring to remain effective all the way until master level. It was on the original SOI and I think it was a little bit over the top, especially since some of the clans straight up had an NPC you could spar with at will. However, I think that definitely talented, and possibly even adroit, should be possible via training. Without this, there'll be too much emphasis on wolf and boar genocide, and not enough margin to set soldiers apart from hunters.